Telephones. My thoughts.

September 3, 2014

Recently I was trawling through the blogosphere when I read this blog about telephone fear by Bangs and a Bun. Because she’s awesome. If you haven’t read it yet (of course you have) I’ll wait here while you prance off and do that. I know I risk you never returning, but I’ll take the chance.

It’s about fear when answering the telephone calls, of the immediacy of it all. I don’t have that exact issue. My husband kind of does, so he often gets me to do the telephone thing for him. Though he’s getting better. This isn’t about that. My telephone problems are different.

Telephones are rude. You’re having a polite conversation with a real life person, or busying yourself with some kind of task that is critical to the furtherment of humankind when a screaming electronic beast enters your life demanding all of your attention NOW NOW NOW! What the hell is that? That’s annoying. If someone did that to you in person they’d get a stony faced glare at the very best. If I’m busy with something why can’t I call back in half and hour? Or we can set up a time when it’s good for both of us to talk. But some folks freak out if you don’t answer straight away, because they assume they have you on drip feed just for them because they have the number for a phone that you’re sometimes near. No. I’ve found that being disrupted by a damn phone call every 10 minutes isn’t the most productive use of my time. Sometimes it’s far more productive to only check calls and messages at specific increments of ‘time it takes to do something awesome’ rather than play slave to every communication.

Worse is when you are chatting to someone in real life and they start giving you an agitated panic face and you don’t know why, but it’s because they’ve got a call coming through on vibrate and they need you to shut up for a second so they can take this. Or, even worse, if you’re not fully facing the person you’re having a conversation with (because who is outside of a restaurant? I’m usually walking or multi-tasking) and they start saying something bizarre that seems out of place in the conversation, so you answer them, only to look over and find they’re annoyed because they’re now having a conversation with someone else on the phone and you’re distracting them. Sorry. I wasn’t kept abreast of this latest development in our communicative relationship. I’ll just go jump in a hole.

Of course, this would all be fine if they were taking an important call, you know, like if their wife had just gone into labour, or they needed an update on their granddad’s condition in hospital and the big call just came through. Totally forgivable and justifiable. But it’s never that. It’s always Steve calling to discuss what time they’re meeting for dinner. Or Abbey wanting to know whether they like the red or the yellow better when it comes to cake frosting. Screw Steve and Abbey. You’re talking to me. Well, you were. But now you’re not and I’m absolutely mortified and humiliated because I’ve realised I’ve been boring you. Going to crawl back into that hole now guys.

To finish off, here’s a No Doubt video where they get attacked by telephones. Because why the hell not?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZktNItwexo&w=640&h=480]